Moziz Addums
Last July at a porch sale I obtained a facsimile copy of
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, by M.C. Tyree, originally
published in 1879. I had been trying to understand the purpose of
ironing. Ironing makes the clothes look nice, but it must have also
served some important purpose, essential for life, that I don't now
understand. In the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House
books, Laura recounts a common saying that scheduled the week's
work:

Wash on Monday
Iron on Tuesday
Mend on Wednesday
Churn on Thursday
Clean on Friday
Bake on Saturday
Rest on Sunday

You bake on Saturday so that you have fresh bread for Sunday dinner.
You wash on Monday because washing is backbreaking labor and you want
to do it right after your day of rest. You iron the following day
before the washed clothes are dirty again. But why iron at all? If
you don't wash the clothes or clean the house, you'll get sick and
die. If you don't bake, you won't have any bread, and you'll starve.
But ironing? In my mind it was categorized with dusting, as something
people with nice houses in the city might do, but not something that
Ma Ingalls, three miles from the nearest neighbor, would concern
herself with.

But no. Ironing, and starching with the water from boiled potatoes,
was so important that it got a whole day to itself, putting it on par
with essential activities like cleaning and baking. But why?

A few months later, I figured it out. In this era of tumble-drying
and permanent press, I had forgotten what happens to fabrics that are
air dried, and did not understand until I was on a trip and tried to
air-dry a cotton bath towel. Air-dried fabrics come out not merely
wrinkled but corrugated, like an accordion, or a washboard, and are
unusable. Ironing was truly a necessity.

Anyway, I was at this porch sale, and I hoped that this 1879
housekeeping book might provide the answer to the ironing riddle. It
turned out to be a cookbook. There is plenty to say about this
cookbook anyway. It comes recommended by many notable ladies,
including Mrs. R.B. Hayes. (Her husband was President of the United
States.) She is quoted on the flyleaf as being "very much pleased"
with the cookbook.

Some of the recipes are profoundly unhelpful. For example, p.106
has:

Boiled salmon. After the fish has been cleaned and washed, dry
it and sew it up in a cloth; lay in a fish-kettle, cover with warm
water, and simmer until done and tender.

Just how long do I simmer it? Oh, until it is "done" and "tender".
All right, I will just open up the fish kettle and poke it to
see. . . except that it is sewed up in a cloth. Hmmm.

You'd think that if I'm supposed to simmer this fish that has been
sewn up in a cloth, the author of the recipe might advise me on how
long until it is "done". "Until tender" is a bit of a puzzle too. In
my experience, fish become firmer and less tender the longer you
simmer them. Well, I have a theory about this. The recipe is
attributed to "Mrs. S.T.", and consulting the index of contributors, I
see that it is short for "Mrs. Samuel Tyree", presumably the editor's
mother-in-law. Having a little joke at her expense, perhaps?

There are a lot of other interesting points, which may appear here
later. For example, did you know that the most convenient size hog
for household use is one of 150 to 200 pounds? And the cookbook
contains recipes not only for tomato catsup, but also pepper catsup,
mushroom catsup, and walnut catsup.

But the real reason I brought all this up is that page 253–254 has
the following item, attributed to "Moziz Addums":

Resipee for cukin kon-feel Pees.
Gether your pees 'bout sun-down. The folrin day, 'bout leven o'clock,
gowge out your pees with your thum nale, like gowgin out a man's
ey-ball at a kote house. Rense your pees, parbile them, then fry 'erm
with some several slices uv streekd middlin, incouragin uv the gravy
to seep out and intermarry with your pees. When modritly brown, but
not scorcht, empty intoo a dish. Mash 'em gently with a spune, mix
with raw tomarters sprinkled with a little brown shugar and the
immortal dish ar quite ready. Eat a hepe. Eat mo and mo. It is good
for your genral helth uv mind and body. It fattens you up, makes you
sassy, goes throo and throo your very soul. But why don't you eat?
Eat on. By Jings. Eat. Stop! Never, while thar is a pee in
the dish.

This was apparently inserted for humorous effect. Around the time the
cookbook was written, there was quite a vogue for dialectal humor of
this type, most of which has been justly forgotten. Probably the
best-remembered practitioner of this brand of humor was Josh Billings,
who I bet you haven't heard of anyway. Tremendously popular at the
time, almost as much so as Mark Twain, his work is little-read today;
the joke is no longer funny. The exceptionally racist example above
is in many ways typical of the genre.

One aspect of this that is puzzling to us today (other than the
obvious "why was this considered funny?") is that it's not clear
exactly what was supposed to be going on. Is the idea that Moziz
Addums wrote this down herself, or is this a transcript by a literate
person of a recipe dictated by Moziz Addums? Neither theory makes
sense. Where do the misspellings come from? In the former theory,
they are Moziz Addums' own misspellings. But then we must imagine
someone literate enough to spell "intermarry" and "immortal"
correctly, but who does not know how to spell "of".

In the other theory, the recipe is a transcript, and the misspellings
have been used by the anonymous, literate transcriber to indicate
Moziz Addums' unusual or dialectal pronunciations, as with
"tomarters", perhaps. But "uv" is the standard (indeed, the only)
pronunciation of "of", which wrecks this interpretation. (Spelling
"of" as "uv" was the signature of Petroleum V. Nasby, another one of
those forgotten dialectal humorists.) And why did the transcriber
misspell "peas" as "pees"?

So what we have here is something that nobody could possibly have
written or said, except as an inept parody of someone else's speech.
I like my parody to be rather less artificial.

All of this analysis would be spoilsportish if the joke were actually
funny. E.B. White famously said that "Analyzing humor is like
dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."
Here, at least, the frog had already been dead for a hundred years
dead before I got to it.

[ Addendum 20100810: In case you were wondering, "kon-feel pees" are
actually "cornfield peas", that is, peas that have been planted in
between the rows of corn in a cornfield. ]